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Ambassador to Mexico resigns

U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual, who criticized his host government’s handling of the drug problem in a cable divulged by the WikiLeaks website, has resigned, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday.

President Felipe Calderon, who met earlier this month with Obama at the White House, had taken umbrage publicly in February over remarks Pascual made in a diplomatic cable about the Mexicans’ handling of the anti-drug trafficking effort there. The diplomatic document was among tens of thousands disclosed by the WikiLeaks website. […]

In a newspaper interview published in late February, Calderon said that U.S.-Mexico relations had been strained because of the leaks of cables.

He specifically cited Pascual’s cable, which he suggested was disparaging of Mexico. The cable said there was little coordination among Mexican federal agencies assigned to battle drug gangs, including Mexico’s army, navy and federal police. The Mexican president said in the interview with El Universal that the cables show U.S. diplomats are ignorant about Mexico’s security situation and are prone to distort and exaggerate “to get their bosses’ attention.”

Calderon said at the time that the U.S. government should help Mexico’s fight against drug gangs by reducing drug use in the United States, the biggest consumer of illegal drugs in the world, and by stemming the flow of automatic rifles to the cartels.

So basically, his fault was to have the wrong stupid idea about the drug war instead of having the correct stupid idea about the drug war.

4 comments to Ambassador to Mexico resigns

As a US citizen living down here, I, for one, am glad to see the SOB go. All he ever did was stir up problems and shove his foot in his mouth, over and over. You guys don’t see or hear as much about him as I do.

Yet, I also know his replacement won’t be worth a shit either. Just another talking head, with strings attached.

And, Louis, Pascual did nothing right, either! The way he runs the Embassy is horrible.

Fearing candor in the drug war, the governments circle their wagons. U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual has violated the primary government role when addressing its drug war: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. He’s been a bad monkey.

President Calderon’s statement that the U.S. is the biggest consumer of illegal drugs in the world should be changed to “biggest uncontrolled consumer,” since the United States is in a distinctly different universe by having no control whatsoever over its illegal drugs, due largely to its zero tolerance prohibitionism.

Where prohibitionism is deemphasized, The Netherlands, Portugal, Czech Republic, and some other EU countries have excellent drug control compared to the United States. These EU countries favor a reliance on personal responsibility regarding drugs. All the numbers say the personal responsibility approach to drugs works infinitely better than prohibition. An open society is a better society, always.